This ecommerce strategy article is an excerpt from our new book, The Ultimate Ecommerce Email & SMS Playbook. We’re diving into our ecommerce strategy chapter focused on the 7 Reasons Why Ecommerce Customers Leave Your Brand.
When you’re deciding which ESP and which CRM to use, think about your future CRM-ESP integration.
CRM-ESP integrations are pivotal to the success of any email marketing program. You can’t get the information you’ll need to create a strategic email marketing program without the personalization and segmentation data from a CRM.
A CRM (which stands for “customer relationship management”) tool is integral for the success of any business, especially E-commerce. Ideally, your CRM will gather your customer interactions across all channels into one platform, enabling you to gain a holistic view of how any given customer has interacted with your brand in any number of ways in one place.
Nowadays, the buzzword for e-commerce brands is CDP – customer data platform – and they act as a “single source of truth” for your customer.
The added value of a CDP is the opportunity to predict customer behavior using bespoke or machine-learning customer modeling as well as push out marketing campaigns directly from their platform.
See the CDP visualization below.
CRM CDP
While different CRMs do different things, most CRMs will at the very least keep a record of what a customer purchased from you and when they made that purchase or purchases. Additionally, most CRMs will keep a record of all communications a customer has had with your business over email, chat, SMS, in-store, phone, and beyond.
The point of mentioning a CRM, ESP, and CDP is that you should know what the software you pay for does, what its capabilities are, and how you can get the most bang for your buck by using it to its limit.
More importantly, you can set up a better email marketing program once you’ve integrated your CRM and your ESP. Better email marketing doesn’t just mean that people will like the emails you send more (although that’s a great starting goal!) – it often also means a better ROI on your email marketing program.
Integrating your CRM and ESP means you’ve connected the two platforms, enabling one or both platforms to share data with the other. These days, most ESPs act as a de-facto CRM for e-commerce brands, so the complexity is reduced, and segmentation/personalization is available out of the box.
Having said that, a robust CRM that contains additional customer data that’s not found in your ESP can bring your segmentation and personalization to the next level. Take multi-location brick and mortar stores: a CRM with individual store data can greatly benefit your customer segmentation and personalization options within your ESP.
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